Some Thoughts on the Guangdong Breakfast Tea

About two months ago I borrowed a book Unraveling The Mystery Chinese Faces (H319.4 3013) from the library. It is written in both English and Chinese, by a Chinese woman who has been living in America for a long time. She has a deep insight into the differences between the East and the West, and in her writing the sense of humor makes the book more interesting. For me because I was always interested in cultural comparison, this book is full of stories that I’ve never heard before. For example, while comparing KFC with our Chinese Guangdong breakfast tea, the author mentioned the fact that when China’s first KFC outlet was opened in 1987, it was not only filled with enormous number of customers, but also held weddings nearly every week, because the Western way of life was considered more fashionable back in the 1980s’ China.

Guangdong breakfast tea is famous in China. Old friends sit face to face in the teahouse, taste all kinds of famous tea and a number of refreshment, talk and laugh. This food culture reflects the typical Chinese life style, especially of the older generation. But it also meets the needs of modern people. As to why Guangdong breakfast tea hasn’t become a brand of world, or even a brand of China, I think the major problem is in the customer base. On the global level, we want people of different countries to accept the morning tea, but if youngsters and the mid-ages still live with so much stress of life, they simply do not have time to choose from the long list of snacks and teas; as for the old people, there seems to be no way that they would change their taste of the whole life.

So now the problem is: how can this “tea” evolve into some kind of fast-food that we don’t have to make any hard choice from, or something that appeals to Western taste and also keeps its Chinese features? Zhen Gongfu might be an example, but at the first stage, the huge capital investment has to be accumulated in the domestic market. Maybe after years of junk food consumption, Chinese people will “rediscover” the value of traditional Chinese food. With the magic effect of marketing, maybe we will find out that adding some tasty snacks to their breakfast is real fashionable; maybe we’ll say that the Sichuan or Hunan style with spicy and strong flavors is incomplete without the exquisite Guangdong food. Then we’ll find some famous people or animal from Guangdong to be endorser, and start to make it world-wide.

That is just some vague thoughts and crazy ideas about the tea from someone who has not even tasted it once. Don’t take it seriously, and it’s not advertising of Guangdong tea or KFC….^ ^